ILGWU Retains Old Dynamism
RASKIN, A. H.
Dubinsky sparks garment workers' parley by proposing new standard for keeping labor's house clean ILGWU RETAINS OLD DYNAMISM By A. H. Raskin Labor reporter, N.Y. "Times" Atlantic City One of the...
...The present expectation is that the union will concentrate most of its political energies this fall on election of a Democratic Congress...
...The composition of the membership is changing, too...
...These workers are the only group the ILGWU has organized in the Puerto Rican garment industry...
...The notion that changing ideas are vital to survival in a changing economy is as unwelcome to such unions as it is to the most complacent member of the National Association of Manufacturers...
...In the realm of ideas, the ILGWU remains a restless union...
...In the three years between conventions, half of its membership had to be replaced...
...It declared that the principle of the Nuremberg Trials that those who shared Hitler's power should also share his guilt was equally applicable to Stalin's former associates and present detractors...
...The happiest aspect of the convention was the formal healing of the 22-year-old rift between the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America...
...The present minimum is 70 cents an hour, and the basic union wage is 10 cents higher...
...The day after Dubinsky laid down this standard in his keynote address, George Meany, AFL-CIO President, gave it his full blessing...
...That is why it is a doubly happy circumstance that the ILGWU leadership has not put its thought processes in the deep freeze...
...the building of housing developments, health centers and luxurious vacation facilities...
...The triennial convention it has just concluded here made it plain that it has no intention of declaring a moratorium on the kind of pioneering that has distinguished it in the economic, social and political field for 56 years...
...He was a prime mover in the successful fight to establish a $1 rate for mainland industries under the Federal Wage-Hour Act...
...A day after the ILGWU spoke, a conference committee of the Puerto Rican House and Senate decided to leave the uplift out of the brassiere wage...
...If anything is to be done about him, it is up to the labor movement itself, not the public authorities...
...It is keeping alert to the needs of its members, its industry and its country...
...The very nature of the industry in which it operates makes that impossible...
...He told the convention delegates exactly how he felt...
...the accumulation of a quarter-billion dollars in welfare, pension and treasury funds...
...The new Dubinsky offensive against men whose principal interest in unionism is "What's in it for me...
...It is good news for labor and the country, therefore, that this melancholy trend has not engulfed the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union...
...Their conventions are dreary affairs, in which the speakers usually find it impossible to triumph over the chatter of the jaded delegates and the resolutions are soggy with Depression-born slogans...
...But he was convinced that the island brassiere shops would find it impossible to compete successfully with mainland plants if they had to match the mainland minimum...
...It is a problem that often involves no violation of any law...
...Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov and Molotov were all put in the guilty class...
...The Federation's high command look refuge in the classic defense of union autonomy, and the resolution would almost certainly have been shelved if Joey Fay, then at the summit of his power, had not taken it into his drink-fogged head ¦to register his distaste for the proposal by taking a punch at Dubinsky in the AFL convention hotel at New Orleans...
...It is probable that it will become part of the official code of the merged labor movement in the next few months...
...There is no possibility of calling in the District Attorney and sending the offenders off to jail...
...The union official who runs a business in the field in which he represents workers has a cloak of legitimacy...
...It stripped the shield of autonomy from unions that had surrendered to corrupt elements...
...Some hold direct ownership interests in companies under contract to their unions...
...Consequently, the appearance of Jacob S. Potofsky, President of the Amalgamated, as a convention speaker represented a meaningful expression of labor unity...
...It was the concept that union leaders who doubled as businessmen were "immoral, unethical and unfit to serve the labor movement...
...The conquest of the sweatshop...
...The unionist-in-business operates in a variety of ways...
...the distribution of $23 million in gifts to labor, liberal and charitable causes all over the world all these provided a basis for solid self-congratulation at the convention...
...The two big needle-trades unions have always shared a common dedication to the principles of clean unionism, industrial statesmanship and community responsibility...
...As one who never has believed that labor should rely on the police or the courts to do its housecleaning...
...Everyone recognizes, however, that no real separation can be made between Presidential and Congressional candidates in a Presidential year...
...Fat and full of years, they ask only to be left alone in the enjoyment of their present power and prestige...
...In that year, the garment union campaigned for a resolution that would empower the AFL Executive Council to intervene where its affiliates showed insufficient vigor in keeping their organizations free of racketeers...
...The vote to push the wage floor up to $1 put Dubinsky on the spot...
...the establishment of a quarter-century of labor peace in a once-turbulent industry...
...Times" Atlantic City One of the most vexing long-term problems of the united labor movement is how to keep its affiliates from succumbing to dry rot...
...Dubinsky has a simple prescription for dealing with union officials who have business ties in their own field: Kick them out...
...Yet, the membership statistics showed a net gain of only 15,000...
...That is the kind of thing you expect in an industry where women make up 80 per cent of the work force and where the multiplicity of small shops causes a high percentage of business failures and reorganizations...
...Now both groups are being displaced by Negroes and Puerto Ricans...
...But it finally became the legal weapon on which the Federation relied to initiate its ouster proceedings against the International Longshoremen's Association...
...Others own businesses that lease equipment or sell services to companies under the gun of their organizations...
...Half the membership is still in metropolitan New York, but the union is pushing more and more into other areas...
...The fracas so dramatized the racketeering issue that the resolution was plucked out of the wastebasket and passed by the delegates...
...It marked the first time that any union had ever protested that a Government agency wanted to make the legal minimum wage for its members too high...
...Adlai E. Stevenson remains the first choice of the ILGWU for the Democratic nomination, but enthusiasm for him has dwindled conspicuously from the high levels of 1952...
...In keeping with its long record of concern with the world situation, the ILGWU devoted much of its attention to warnings that the downgrading of Stalin meant no break with Stalinism as a system...
...Later, at a private luncheon, he gave the ILGWU high command an intimate review of the exchanges between Khrushchev and the British Laborites when the Russian Happiness Boys were making their doleful visit to London...
...Too many unions show an unhappy disposition to stagnate...
...Often, the business interests are set up in the names of wives or sons...
...Actually, the coolness that grew out of differences over the American Labor party, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the personal hostilities between Dubinsky and the late Sidney Hillman has been thawing out for several years...
...This unusual protest was called forth by a unanimous vote of the Puerto Rican House of Representatives to raise the minimum for 4,000 brassiere workers to $1 an hour...
...However, there is little chance that the Amalgamated will join the ILGWU and Alex Rose's United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union in the Liberal party...
...He put his argument so persuasively that even the Puerto Rican delegation went along with his call for defeat of the $1 floor...
...If the same yardstick is accepted elsewhere in labor, the fight for honest unionism will have taken another long step forward...
...But whatever the guise the danger is the same the unionist's own pocketbook takes priority over his duties to the men and women whose welfare he was chosen to protect...
...The ILGWU is not a union to stand still...
...In one respect, the ILGWU convention was unique...
...So the big effort between now and the Democratic convention in August will be to convince the party that it may lose labor support altogether if it goes too far in appeasing Southern pro-segregationists...
...If it does, it will represent almost as fundamental a contribution to the battle against union corruption as the ILGWU made at the time it reentered the AFL in 1940...
...On the convention's very first day, the ILGWU produced an idea that provided a significant new yardstick for the conduct of clean unionism in the AFL-CIO...
...hits at a more subtle problem than that involved in extortion, kickbacks, welfare-fund looting, and other union crimes...
...The Eastern European Jews who played a primary part in building the union long ago lost numerical superiority to the Italians...
...Hugh Gaitskell, head of the British Labor party, won enthusiastic applause for his critical appraisal of the deficiencies of Western diplomacy in dealing with the Soviet threat...
...The convention found itself afflicted with the same kind of indecision about the Presidential campaign that depresses most union leaders these days...
...In legislative campaigns, pressure for the elimination of union racketeers and measures to prevent jurisdictional issues from marring the harmony between them, the two unions are setting a high standard of cooperation for the guidance of the rest of the merged organization...
...Each shift brings new problems...
...He emphasized that a wage rate was meaningless if it meant there would be no work, and he recalled the many instances in which the powerful garment joint boards in New York had passed up wage increases because they felt they would lose more than they would gain by forcing employers out of business and shutting off work opportunities...
...Two hundred thousand new members were signed up or came back after absences from the industry...
...For more than twelve years after that, it remained largely a dead letter...
...But, under the electric leadership of David Dubinsky, the representatives of 445,000 garment workers did not confine themselves to looking backward...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
